Now the enterprise of forming one’s literary taste is an agreeable one; if it is not agreeable it cannot succeed.  But this does not imply that it is an easy or a brief one.  The enterprise of beating Colonel Bogey at golf is an agreeable one, but it means honest and regular work.  A fact to be borne in mind always!  You are certainly not going to realise your ambition—­and so great, so influential an ambition!—­by spasmodic and half-hearted effort.  You must begin by making up your mind adequately.  You must rise to the height of the affair.  You must approach a grand undertaking in the grand manner.  You ought to mark the day in the calendar as a solemnity.  Human nature is weak, and has need of tricky aids, even in the pursuit of happiness.  Time will be necessary to you, and time regularly and sacredly set apart.  Many people affirm that they cannot be regular, that regularity numbs them.  I think this is true of a very few people, and that in the rest the objection to regularity is merely an attempt to excuse idleness.  I am inclined to think that you personally are capable of regularity.  And I am sure that if you firmly and constantly devote certain specific hours on certain specific days of the week to this business of forming your literary taste, you will arrive at the goal much sooner.  The simple act of resolution will help you.  This is the first preliminary.

The second preliminary is to surround yourself with books, to create for yourself a bookish atmosphere.  The merely physical side of books is important—­more important than it may seem to the inexperienced.  Theoretically (save for works of reference), a student has need for but one book at a time.  Theoretically, an amateur of literature might develop his taste by expending sixpence a week, or a penny a day, in one sixpenny edition of a classic after another sixpenny edition of a classic, and he might store his library in a hat-box or a biscuit-tin.  But in practice he would have to be a monster of resolution to succeed in such conditions.  The eye must be flattered; the hand must be flattered; the sense of owning must be flattered.  Sacrifices must be made for the acquisition of literature.  That which has cost a sacrifice is always endeared.  A detailed scheme of buying books will come later, in the light of further knowledge.  For the present, buy—­buy whatever has received the imprimatur of critical authority.  Buy without any immediate reference to what you will read.  Buy!  Surround yourself with volumes, as handsome as you can afford.  And for reading, all that I will now particularly enjoin is a general and inclusive tasting, in order to attain a sort of familiarity with the look of “literature in all its branches.”  A turning over of the pages of a volume of Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of English Literature, the third for preference, may be suggested as an admirable and a diverting exercise.  You might mark the authors that flash an appeal to you.